Tiger Woods Is No. 1 Again, But Golf Hardly Missed Him

Just in time for the Masters Tournament, golf superstar Tiger Woods is back at the top of the sport's rankings. But does professional golf need him like it used to? WSJ's Matt Futterman looks at some of the new faces bringing fans to the sport.

By

Matthew Futterman

Updated April 10, 2013 7:15 p.m. ET

When the career of golf's top player and biggest star was in free fall in 2010, the brain trust of professional golf in the U.S. gathered in their Florida headquarters to contemplate life after Tiger Woods.

Huddling with consultants from their Austin, Texas, advertising firm, senior executives at the PGA Tour tried to figure out how to persuade fans, sponsors and television networks to stay invested in a sport whose biggest draw had been disgraced. The golf world looked like it was about to go through a difficult generational transition.

"Every 10 to 15 years you have a passing of the baton from one face to the other," says Ty Votaw, the tour's executive vice president. "We were about at that 15-year mark with Tiger." There was one problem, though—there wasn't any obvious candidate ready to grab the torch from Mr. Woods, and the consensus among sports-industry executives was that professional golf was headed for trouble.

Defying predictions, the post-Tiger collapse never happened, thanks to the rise of a flashy new crop of players. By nearly every measure, professional golf became richer, more competitive and more stable while Mr. Woods was dealing with the sex scandal and injuries that sent his career careening off course.

Photos: Golf's Rising Stars

A flashy new crop of players like Bubba Watson and Rory McIlroy sprouted just as Tiger Woods's troubles hit.

Getty Images

Masters Coverage

Follow the WSJ's live streaming coverage of the Masters Tournament next Sunday.

Now there is an added boost: Mr. Woods, who will tee off on Thursday at the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club where he became a megastar in 1997, recaptured the No. 1 ranking last month. He did it with a win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando, just a few miles from the site of the car accident on Thanksgiving weekend in 2009 that began the unraveling of his personal life.

Tour revenues rose to a record $1.11 billion last year, compared with $1.02 billion in 2010. The tour's new nine-year television contract with NBC and CBS, signed in 2011 when Mr. Woods was tumbling down the rankings, will pay an average of about $800 million annually, a 33% increase over the previous deal, according to one person with knowledge of the deal.

The PGA Tour now has title sponsors for all 42 of its tournaments, each of them paying $6 million to $12 million, depending on the event. Last year, FedEx Corp. extended its deal through 2017 to provide at least $35 million a year in prize money, and tens of millions more in advertising, for the season-ending FedEx Cup championship.

Television ratings still spike when Mr. Woods is on the leaderboard in a final round, especially at a one of golf's four majors championships. But CBS, the tour's lead broadcaster, says more people are tuning in to final-round coverage even when Mr. Woods isn't in the field.

Tiger Woods: Staging a Comeback

Tiger Woods has won 77 tournaments on the PGA Tour, including 14 professional majors, the latter figure second only to Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 professional majors. See some key dates in his career.

"We're happy that he's back and that he's playing well, but we've always felt he spikes off a very strong base, and we think what we've done the past couple of years shows that," says the PGA Tour's Mr. Votaw.

At the Masters, Mr. Woods will resume his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 major championships. He has been stuck at 14 since 2008, when he began struggling with injuries. He lost the No. 1 ranking, which he had held for all but a few months since 1997, in 2010, eventually falling to 58th.

As he faded, the spotlight shifted to players who were teenagers or younger when Mr. Woods came of age. Those players don't look, act or dress like the golfer of yore, preferring flashy, bright colors and slim-tailored cuts to pleated plaids. More important, they have proven gifted, making the sport as deep and competitive as it has been since Mr. Woods's emergence.

The emergence of players such as 34-year-old Mr. Watson, Northern Ireland's 23-year-old Rory McIlroy, and Rickie Fowler, a 24-year-old American who grew up racing dirt bikes, came at a perfect time for the sport. They were golfers in the Tiger Woods mold—supremely talented and fit athletes who happened to play golf. Dustin Johnson, for instance, can dunk a basketball.

ENLARGE

Tiger Woods regained his top ranking last month in Orlando.
Getty Images

Still, tour executives felt they needed a strategy. By the fall of 2010, the PGA Tour was starting negotiations on a new television deal, which provides the bulk of its revenues. Some of the tour's tournaments needed new deals for title sponsors. Millions of fans who associated golf with Mr. Woods and his aging rival, Phil Mickelson, couldn't pick budding stars like Messrs. Johnson and Fowler out of a lineup.

In the fall of 2010, PGA executives gathered in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., with a team from the Austin advertising firm GSD&M to concoct a way to sell the sport in a post-Tiger world.

One idea was to focus on the different type of fan that each of the emerging players attracted. Mr. Watson, for instance, a self-taught free spirit from the Florida panhandle, is a favorite with the beer-and-wings crowd.

Mr. Votaw says that approach didn't feel sustainable over time, and didn't reflect the emerging competitive tension between the new stars and tour veterans. Professional golf, he argues, was in one of those critical periods "where the young people come in and begin to overtake the stars that preceded them."

The resulting ad campaign, called "Vs.," would highlight younger players such as Messrs. Fowler, Watson and Johnson taking on the establishment and trying to break into the sport's elite.

Fortuitously, as the PGA Tour rolled out the commercials, those players began winning. Mr. Watson captured two tournaments in 2011, then won the Masters last year with a miraculous shot out of the woods on the final playoff hole. Keegan Bradley, 26 years old, won the PGA Championship as a rookie in 2011.

ENLARGE

Golf had found a new story to tell, and with the economy recovering, sponsors and television partners were ready to listen.

"We all got spoiled for more than a decade with Tiger's performances," says Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports. "But we looked at the incredible strength of the young players and thought there was a great future in being associated with the tour."

Because the PGA Tour is a nonprofit organization that turns over its excess cash to charity, one measure of golf's success is the size of those contributions. The tour donated a record $130 million in 2012, surpassing the previous high of $125 million in 2010. The tour is projecting record profits for this year, thanks to the new TV deal.

Prize money for players will reach a record $298 million this year, up from $278 million in 2008.

Part of the PGA Tour's appeal to NBC and CBS is that its sponsors commit to buying roughly 75% of the ads during the broadcasts. "It's as close to a guarantee as you're going to see in big-time sports today," says Mr. McManus.

CBS has seen television viewership for golf rise steadily. Audiences for final-round coverage of tour events averaged 3.5 million in 2012, 46% higher than in 2010. So far this year, an average of 4.1 million viewers have watched final-round coverage of the network's three tournament broadcasts. NBC's audiences grew to 3.4 million viewers last year, from 2.3 million in 2010.

Mr. Woods's participation in tournaments still has a big effect—but not as big as it once did. In 2012, his participation in a final round boosted viewership by 60%, compared with 118% in 2009.

One of the few parts of professional golf that doesn't appear stronger now than in 2009 is the business of being Tiger Woods. Mr. Woods doesn't disclose how much he makes, but he has fewer of the kind of blue-chip sponsors that once boosted his annual income to roughly $100 million. He lost Gatorade, General Motors, Accenture and Gillette, but still has Nike, EA Sports and Rolex.

That, too, might be changing. Mark Steinberg, Mr. Woods's agent, says his phone has been ringing far more often in recent months as his client climbed the rankings. "I've certainly seen a bit of a sea change in the corporate marketplace the past several weeks," he says.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.